Yes, you should use MENAdoc and here’s why and how

By Torsten Wollina (MSC Cofund Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin)

There are several noteworthy initiatives in Germany that are pushing the boundaries of #openaccess to both sources and secondary literature. Only recently, a joint project of several German university and research libraries has received funding for creating an online union catalogues for manuscripts in the Arabic script held by those libraries (named Orient digital). Leipzig University is home to the long-term project Bibliotheca Arabica which aims at a reassessment of Arabic literary history by putting it in conversation with manuscript studies. Unofficially, it has already been described as Brockelmann 2 (or 2.0). The digitization project Translatio at Bonn University is currently identifying periodicals in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish published between 1860 and 1945 and makes them accessible online. Yet another initiative is the Bamberger Islam-Enzyklopädie headed by Patrick Franke. It provides a framework which aims at engaging scholars to disseminate their expertise on Wikipedia in German. Through this encyclopedia, authored Wikipedia articles become visible as citable publications.

At the moment, by far the largest initiative towards #openaccess is hosted by the University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle). It offers two main online resources: MENALIB is the virtual specialist library but I will be focusing here on the online repository MENAdoc because it is, in my opinion, a truly unique treasure trove of primary and secondary sources.

Historical background

In 1949, the German Research Foundation established a first plan for disciplinary repositories collecting, in particular, foreign literature to make it available at least in one German library (Sondersammelgebiete). This was to serve as a decentralized National Library. Recently, the funding structure has been changed to a more short-term structure (Fachinformationsdienst).

In all cases, these special collections are located in either research or university libraries. For instance, CrossAsia provides resources on East, Southeast, and South Asia, the internet library subsaharan Africa speaks for itself, Propylaeum is the portal for ancient history and archaeology including Egyptology, and osmikon focuses East and Southeast Europe. If I have failed to mention your area of interest, please refer to webis at the State and University Library Hamburg where all special collections are listed. Most or even all of them feature an #openaccess publication service.

The special collection for research on the Near East, North Africa and Islam is affiliated with the University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle). After the purchase of 3,000 volumes of Jacob M. Landau’s research library in 2003, this collection has been catalogued in its entirety and 345 volumes have been digitized and uploaded. Since then, more than 300 volumes of the series Islamkundliche Untersuchungen (Schwarz-Verlag), the back issues of the German Orientalist Society with a moving-wall (Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft=ZDMG), and, to different extents, the book series of the Orient-Institut Beirut and the Orient-Institut Istanbul have been digitized and catalogued. The Istanbuler Texte und Studien (ITS) and the Beiruter Texte und Studien (BTS) are released with a moving wall, whereas the long-standing series of Arabic editions, Bibliotheca Islamica (BI) is published simultaneously with the printed books. The digitization project SSG Vorderer Orient Digital has added another some 3,000 books to the collection. Currently, the collection stands at around 15,000 titles.

The collections

As can be gathered from the afore-going, MENAdoc allows access to a host of materials. Although not comprehensively, it grants access to both current and historical research literature in about fifty languages, including Arabic, Latin, English and French. In terms of both primary sources and secondary literature, the collection is focused on Arabic (1,484 titles). Other African and Asian languages are present to a much lower degree. Turkish (295 titles in modern Turkish and 63 in Ottoman Turkish) and Syriac (159 titles) are the only languages with more than a hundred entries. The collection also covers an impressive period stretching from the 16th to the 21st century. For instance, it allows you to ‘leaf through’ the 1593 Roman edition of Ibn Sīnā’s „Kitāb al-najāt: mukhtaṣar al-Shifā“, published by Tipografia Medicea Orientale [image 1].

The digitization of large parts of the disciplinary repository (Sondersammelgebiet) makes sure that MENAdoc is representative in terms of older research literature, which is out of copyright. This should be especially interesting—but not exclusively—for book historians and those who are interested in the history of their disciplines. It does not replace your usual bibliographic survey but it certainly helps with it and comes with the additional benefit that you can actually read those books. The collection is further interesting for manuscript researchers because of the digitized catalogues it offers, for instance for William Ouseley’s extensive manuscript collection.

At the moment, MENAdoc exists in two places. The established platform uses the proprietary software Visual Library (VL) and will be discussed further below. At the same time, a new collection is being developed and tested using open source software. While still being in development for the foreseeable future, the new collection has begun to grow and will provide new functionalities for users. On this platform, you can already now find more recent secondary literature due to an agreement on the #openaccess publication of copyright protected works.

At one point, the entire collection will be migrated to the new platform, with each publication (also book chapters) receiving a catalogue entry, a URN and a DOI signifier. The new catalogue entries will be made available for other libraries so the digitizations show up in their digital catalogues as well. I will make sure to add an update at the end of this post once the collections will be migrated.

If you require access to additional out-of-print or public domain research literature from Germany, don’t hesitate to get in contact with the MENAlib team. They appreciate your input.

How to find things?

The full-text search is the real gem of the collection and what makes MENAdoc so fantastic a resource. You practically have those 15,000 titles at your fingertips. In my experiences the search function works best with one distinct word only. If that is not enough, use “+” between terms instead of space to find instances where the words appear together.

The output for your search is what really makes MENAdoc so fantastic a resource. It does not only show you the publications which contain said word but also lead you directly to the relevant passages when you expand the menu [image 2]. This includes bibliographies, captions, and indices. You can access those results in the online viewer and download individual pages or the entire works as PDFs (not OCR-readable).

 

 

For all searches, the additional filters in the side bar will be very helpful. One smaller caveat in this regard is necessary. The long-running ZDMG might fall out of your search results when you limit the temporal filter. For additional information, please see  Evyn Kropf’s great advice on how to search for historical manuscript catalogues.

Another caveat is that due to the current state of Arabic OCR, this function is not available for most volumes in that script. This issue will probably be resolved at some point in the future. Also, be aware of the historical depth and multilingualism of the collection, both of which require trying out different spellings for something you are searching. I, for one, was looking for materials on the 20th-century Egyptian book collector Aḥmad Taymūr (d. 1930). His name was transcribed in three different ways: Teimur, Taimur, Tejmur.

This is, however, a larger issue if you are working on some geographical or other entity which is not only given in transcription but also in the respective research languages. Or if you are looking for publications printed in a specific location. MENAdoc gives places of publication as they are given in the respective books. So, if you are looking for books printed in Cairo in the 1800s, you should consider „al-Qāhira“ (or Qahira), Kairo, le Caire, etc. In any case, I recommend having a translator or dictionary open in one tab of your browser.

So what are you waiting for?